2024 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

In the educational landscape, textbooks have long been fundamental pillars for transmitting knowledge. Traditional textbooks often fall short in addressing the unique needs of various courses and the ever-evolving nature of academic disciplines. They lack the flexibility instructors need to tailor materials for specific course requirements or a particular semester. This lack of flexibility makes instructors face the dual challenge of ensuring their course content remains both up-to-date and aligned with available resources. To cover all aspects of a course, some instructors may work around this issue by recommending multiple textbooks. However, instructors find that it can overwhelm students with many resources and financially burden them with the high costs of traditional textbooks.

To overcome challenges posed by traditional textbooks and offer the flexibility instructors seek, we introduce TextCraft – a web application designed to automate custom textbook creation. Drawing from a database of 3 million book chapters sourced from public libraries via a specialized web crawler, our application crafts textbooks tailored to specific course needs. Instructors input their course outline, and the application recommends the ten most relevant textbooks from the database. Through a user-friendly interface, the instructor can preview, select, edit, and merge content from multiple textbooks to produce a customized textbook that aligns seamlessly with their course objectives. This tool transforms the traditionally tedious textbook creation process into an efficient and highly personalized experience.

We evaluate our application based on feedback from instructors teaching a second-year programming course, and we assess how well the output aligns with the input of course outlines. Based on interviews and surveys filled by instructors asking about the usability and relevance of the textbooks created, we got feedback with a high satisfaction rate of over 90%. By incorporating this feedback, we are consistently improving the system. To gauge the effectiveness of our application, we conducted a study assessing the alignment between customized textbooks and the specific requirements of each course. By inputting several course outlines, we assessed whether the matching textbooks adequately covered all the topics. The high matching rate in our initial evaluations highlights the effectiveness of our application in aligning educational content with the specific needs of a course.